In the past, one wishing to establish access to a telephone network would simply have a professional install a suitable phone jack with standard connectors intended to act as the female connection to a compatible jack functionally wired to a telephone or telephone base station. However, it was not long before residential telephone customers began installing multiple lines for multiple telephone handsets and other compatible devices such as computers housing computer modems and fax machines.
Although one could wire separate telephone lines to each phone jack, it is often times felt to be more desirable to wire multiple lines that would be available at each jack. Specifically, multiple inner conductors and outer conductors of a phone jack are provided such that, for example, three different telephone lines can be wired to a single jack and accessed by the above-noted telephones and other compatible devices. As such, pairs of conductors for each line referred to as a tip and ring pair are fed to each jack each operating at a line voltage, typically a nominal −48 or −24 volts across the tip and ring pair of the line. Such jacks can also be expanded to an additional line for other data transfer including television content.
Although commonly available multi-line telephones can be employed in the above-described multi-line telephone jack installations, difficulties arise when fax machines and computer modems are employed, either alone, or together with standard telephone handsets and base stations. For example, unless connected to a dedicated telephone line, current devices can only access line 1 of a multi-line jack. One wishing to access the worldwide web in such an installation over a dial up modem could be blocked from such access as the line being employed for this purpose may be busy or “off hook” when another compatible device is in use. The present invention can be used on any device utilizing telephone line connectivity.
It is thus an object of the present invention to provide a self-contained switching device capable of selectively attaching a compatible device, utilizing telephone line connectivity, such as a computer modem, fax machine, and telephone to a multi-telephone line source in order to marshal these resources and enable such compatible devices to operate simultaneously while avoiding those difficulties recited above.
These and further objects will be more readily apparent when considering the following disclosure and appended claims.